Music, Creativity & Justice with Ruth Naomi Floyd
Our Summer 2025 series, Beside Still Waters, focuses on the places where creativity brings life into a world fatigued by brokenness and division. From jazz to Jane Austen and in between, this season we’ll focus on the ways literature and the arts can refresh and challenge our inner lives—and connect us with the Creator of the good, the true, and the beautiful.How should we live faithfully within a world created to be good and beautiful, and yet everywhere marred by ugliness and injustice? Jazz vocalist and composer Ruth Naomi Floyd will guide us in bringing together music, creativity, and justice, and help us think about our roles in repairing, re-envisioning, and creating new places of beauty and flourishing:We know that art shapes and reshapes us and that it’s there in the cross of Jesus, I believe, where beauty and violence collided and beauty won. And so that act of loving someone…purposely trying to love someone, especially those that seem or are viewed or deemed unlovable, is…directly connected and intrinsically connected to our art making.We hope you are encouraged by Ruth’s artistic journey, as she helps us to find beauty in the midst of suffering, and to express love through creativity.This podcast is an edited version of an online conversation recorded in 2021. Watch the full video of the conversation here, and learn more about Ruth Naomi Floyd.Authors and books mentioned in the conversation:The Frederick Douglass Jazz WorksIt Was Good, Making Music to the Glory of God, by Ruth Naomi FloydThe Problem of Good, by Ruth Naomi FloydDr. John NunezToni MorrisonMartin Luther King Jr.Vincent van GoghHans Christian AndersenMiles DavisFrancis SchaefferJoshua StamperRelated Trinity Forum Readings:A Narrative of the Life of Frederick DouglassLetters from Vincent van GoghLetter from Birmingham Jail, by Martin Luther King Jr.Revelation, by Flannery O’ConnorBulletins from Immortality, by Emily DickinsonRelated Conversations:A New Year With The Word with Malcolm GuiteTo listen to this or any of our episodes in full, visit ttf.org/podcast and to join the Trinity Forum Society and help make content like this possible, join the Trinity Forum Society